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Nasir and Matt discuss the pregnancydiscrimination case against AutoZone that resulted in a $185 million verdict. They also answer, "Can I protect our trade secrets in a confidentiality agreement?" Full Podcast Transcript NASIR: All right. Welcome to our podcast where we cover business in the news and answer some of your business legal questions that you, the listener, can send in to ask@legallysoundsmartbusiness.com. My name is Nasir Pasha and joining with me today is just me, actually. So, perfect. MATT: Just you. All right, that’s fine. That’s less work I have to do. NASIR: Oh, Matt’s here, too. MATT: I’m Matt Staub. I’m here; ready to offer my input on stories and other things. NASIR: Yeah. So, we do have to say goodbye to our audio producer. He’s gone on to bigger and better things. His name is Chris and he’s been replaced by another Matt – Matthew, I should say, right? MATT: Yeah. NASIR: And I actually offered him to replace you as a co-host. MATT: Yeah. NASIR: He refused. It would have been perfect, but I told him he would have had to change his last name, too. He refused. MATT: Yeah, it wouldn’t have worked because I would have had to be the one who did the editing and producing, and I can’t do that. I can barely even record correctly half the time. NASIR: All right. So, thanks again everyone for joining us, and let’s get to our first story. MATT: Well, we have a local story – well, local for me, not local for you. NASIR: Not in Houston. MATT: Well, there’s probably AutoZones out there, right? NASIR: Uh, I haven’t seen one. I don’t know if there’s pregnant people out there either so I don’t know if either of these things apply to us. MATT: No one has cars. No one has kids. So, yeah… So, this was in San Diego but this is a pretty huge case in terms of at least the payout. It was a lawsuit of a former – I believe she was a former manager. NASIR: Some kind of manager, yeah. MATT: So, she was pregnant and she was later demoted from her position as manager and, of course, terminated because that’s why we’re talking about it. So, she sued for discrimination for her being pregnant and – guess what – she got a huge award here; $172,000 worth of compensatory damages – so that’s pretty good – and then an astounding $185 million in punitive damages. Punitive damages are only for penalizing, you know, basically someone for screwing up and that’s a pretty excessive penalty. I would think this has to be one of the biggest single payouts for one individual in terms of discrimination lawsuit. NASIR: No, I think you’re right. I did look. I think it definitely has broken records. But the problem is it is a verdict so I don’t believe this is a judgment, and this’ll happen often where a jury will decide some kind of million-dollar payout but then judge will reduce it, and punitive damages are often done that way. There’s some constitutional issues with having extreme judgments like that that have already been addressed previously. So, we should expect that to go down. MATT: Yeah. NASIR: Nonetheless, for a store, for AutoZone that has quite a number of stores – 4,000 stores – across the US, this is not a small issue. MATT: Yeah, and I just don’t see how companies like this still continue to screw up. I mean… NASIR: This is a huge screw-up. I mean, they have the vice-president of Western operations, so that’s probably close to the very, very top, right? MATT: Yeah. NASIR: And him pulling the district manager aside, saying, “What are we running here? A boutique? Get rid of these women.” MATT: I didn’t see that. Gosh. NASIR: Yeah, from a plaintiff's employer attorney, you can’t get any better than that as far as proving your claim against gender discrimination. And, by the way, pregnancy disability discrimination as well. MATT: The actual promotion and then demotion happened about ten years ago. She got pregnant in ’05, demoted in ’06, and then she filed a lawsuit while she was still working there in 2008.